Kerry Stokes’ empire of shit
Channel Seven gives special treatment to special people.
Former Liberal Party staffer Bruce Lehrmann, who assaulted his colleague Brittany Higgins on a senator’s couch at parliament house, is just the most recent. Lehrmann is a rapist—but a rapist whose $2,000 weekly rent was paid for by Seven News until early April, once his disastrous defamation case came to a head.
To clinch exclusive interviews with Lehrmann for the Spotlight program, the network also paid a total of $10,000 for Thai massages, paid for flights for a golf trip to Tasmania and reimbursed Lehrmann for his outlays on cocaine and sex workers, according to ex-producer Taylor Auerbach. The subsequent Spotlight puff pieces gave the rapist a national platform to try to destroy his victim’s reputation.
“Gutter journalism” is too lofty a term: this was scraping the bottom of the sewer. Yet this was no one-off.
It follows Seven’s support for war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith in his defamation suit against Fairfax journalists. That case backfired too: the court on 1 June 2023 agreed with reporters that the decorated ex-SAS soldier murdered four Afghans in cold blood. Total legal costs, which reportedly reached $35 million according to an article in the Guardian, were paid for by Seven West Media’s billionaire owner and chair Kerry Stokes.
Is this also the tale of a slimy commercial power struggle? Lehrmann’s defamation suit targeted Network Ten journalist Lisa Wilkinson, while Roberts-Smith fought reporters from the Nine Entertainment Company. The war for market share between Seven, Nine and Ten is the stuff of corporate legend, and perhaps played a part. But it is not the full story: Seven also backed Lehrmann, and especially Roberts-Smith, to push the toxic politics of its billionaire owner.
Stokes is arguably the country’s most influential news mogul. As well as the television channel, Seven West Media controls 30 newspapers and exercises a near-monopoly over Western Australian news.
In 2022, Perth Mayor Basil Zempilas introduced him as “the man who really runs the state” at an annual dinner hosted by Stokes and attended by then WA Premier Mark McGowan, according to the Australian Financial Review’s Mark di Stefano. “Stokes gathers oligarchs to kiss the ring”, the newspaper headlined its report of the following year’s gathering.
It’s easy to see why Stokes backed Roberts-Smith: his undying support for Australian militarism. In the 1990s, Stokes founded the charity SAS Resources Fund to support returned soldiers and served as chair of the Australian War Memorial from 2007 to 2022. Roberts-Smith was general manager of Seven Media Queensland, and fellow ex-SAS Andrew McMahon was chief operating officer for Stokes’ private company Australian Capital Equity.
In the Lehrmann case, Liberal partisanship played a role. Seven’s decision to pay more than $100,000 for mudslinging interviews was partially damage control for a party still haunted by misogyny scandals.
Some are questioning whether Seven can survive. Free-to-air television is already the sick man of the media, kept on life support by declining year-on-year advertising revenue. SWM’s share price of $0.21 is far from its 2007 peak of nearly $15. The company is currently worth $323 million—down 48 percent since August. It’s a fraction of Stokes’ total wealth of $10.1 billion, which overwhelmingly comes from investments in property, mining and construction.
But Stokes may be determined to hold on to the ailing network, because owning a traditional media empire pays in other ways. For example, it can disseminate ideas that its owner wants more people to hold, and therefore is quite a political tool.
You can partly thank Seven for Pauline Hanson’s rehabilitation after a decade in the political wilderness. The disgraced former politician resurfaced on morning show Sunrise before the 2016 federal election. The network paid at least $5,000 for 20-odd appearances, according to Crikey estimates. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation went from zero to four senate seats in that election, and still has two.
When Australian terrorist Brenton Tarrant slaughtered 51 Muslims in Christchurch in 2019, Sunrise host David Koch described his white supremacist manifesto as “like One Nation immigration policy”—but Seven kept Hanson as a regular guest anyway.
Then there’s plain-old Seven “news”: round-the-clock promotion of law-and-order politics, turning the camera away from society’s most elite criminals and zooming in on its pettiest. On 22 April, the top twenty headlines at 7news.com.au included twelve related to interpersonal violence and car crashes, including “Man attacked and robbed by women after kind act” and “Domino’s worker allegedly throws pizza at customer”.
Finally, with its power to steer policy debate, and make or break political careers, traditional media acts as a force multiplier for big business’s built-in leverage. Describing the influence of the West Australian, Glenn Dyer and Bernard Keane write at Crikey: “That paper functions as the in-house newsletter and chief enforcer of the mining and fossil fuel lobby that controls that state and its government-for-hire, currently managed by WA Labor”. Now, mining billionaire Gina Rinehart is funding the launch of another Stokes project, online newspaper the Nightly.
With 30 established newspapers and another just released, the sewer at Seven is just one burst main in Kerry Stokes’ empire of shit.
